May

You wake up. You’re in your house. There’s a gigantic white dog slumbering peacefully with one eye open and a timer that appears to be counting down 120 seconds. You jump up, grab the timer, and run out. You stumble out into a huge monochrome map. North? West? One way is blocked. A minute left. There’s a lighthouse right next to you. You climb as the timer counts down. As the seconds slip away, you find an important quest item at the top of the lighthouse. Congrats! You are holding a tool to process logs looking for frequency of method calls! Ding! The time is up.

You wake up in your little house. There’s the dog… and oh yeah, you suddenly recall that you got an item yesterday. You look around for it. The dog is drooling all over it in its slumber. You sigh but are afraid to wake the beast. You grab the timer and run outside again. The lighthouse is gone, and the only way open to you today is south. You head south as the timer counts down, pausing to examine a stray catalog item with a tag control element. You see that the item is broken, that you cannot order it as you should be able to. You drop it in frustration. Ding!

You wake up. The dog is nowhere to be seen. Incidentally, your tool to process logs isn’t either, and you wonder ruefully if you should have saved it from its fate. The timer is counting down. You grab it and run, heading south again until you reach your catalog item with a tag control element from yesterday. And lo and behold, it appears to be fully functional today! Marvelling, you barely notice that you’re again out of time.

You wake up. The dog is back. Your process logs tool is beaten up but still mostly intact. You grab it and the timer. The dog stirs but does not wake. You hide the tool in your chest, delighting at the fact that it also contains a new Openstack Cinder EventCatcher worker and head out again with the timer. This time there appears to be a small river next to your house. You head towards the sound of the water. On the beach are several RHV markers. Delighted, you grab them. Ding!

You wake up to a very strange sight. The dog has seemingly grown very long claws and is reading on the floor. You stumble to your feet and back up a few steps hurridly. The beast looks at the ticking timer and barks once, a strange bark infused with the burning smell of charter magic. The timer stops. The dog languidly looks up at you, its paws growing back to their regular size, and noses the book towards you. You stare blankly at the upsidedown page, struggling to decipher the seven words which have appeared in front of your eyes. “Fixes disk size misreporting for some disks”, you read. The dog barks again, and the time is, once again, up.

You wake up. You realize with some dread that a sense of realism, concise documentation, perfecting the art of recognizing and handling abnormal people, moving to the eighth dimension, secret messages from your teeth, knowing every line of Airplane!, the music that is sometimes known as blues, a misguided but adorable belief in meaning, or even the sudden development of some semblance of a personality cannot save you.